E12 Beta 1

Last week, we signed off on E12 Beta 1. This is a great milestone for the product and the team. We've delivered SP1, SP2, ExBPA, and many other great tools along the way - but E12 has always been our primary goal in the 2 years since Exchange 2003 shipped.

Right from the beginning, our high level goals for E12 were pretty simple:

The team will be blogging about various aspects of these 3 themes over the coming months. I am very pleased with our team's progress towards these goals. Many of our customers will see storage costs reduced 80%. Monad changes everything when it comes to systems management. My calendar experience with E12 is something I cannot give up. I am personally addicted to my E12 mobile device experience. I think the speech recognition built into E12 unified messaging is the coolest thing ever. The server is keeping my email usage totally compliant with our company's records management policies. There is so much more...

Our immediate plans are to distribute this release to a group of 1400 customers and partners that have expressed explicit interest in testing this release. Unfortunately, we don't have room to support more right now - but early next year, we plan to distribute the release through MSDN and TechNet subscribers. I hope most of you get an opportunity to try out the release, and give us feedback. We're eager to hear from you.

Here at Microsoft, we are now running E12 Beta 1 for 3,000 users (including the entire Exchange team, the entire Office team, the MOM team, the SBS team, the Speech technologies team, the Windows Mobile team, and many other lucky folks). I always think it's cool to check out our latest "dogfood" topology (which is intentionally over-complex to test a variety of configurations).

Indeed, dogfood topology is unreadable. Also any more spippets of info on the complicance features of E12? Is this goign to be pitched against archiving products like AfterMail and Symantec Enterprise Vault?

First – What was wrong with the old admin experience? Granted the old admin experience probably is not perfect, but will this new admin experience be perfect?

Also on adding admin features – From my experience every time MS introduces ONE new way to admin machines they introduce ONE HUNDRED new bugs in that feature admin that can compromise my system. Just lookup WMI bugs or Windows management bugs and see what you get.

CONTROL – Your control goal should be this

"The ability to"… lol I almost gave yall a great idea for free. Good luck with taking on Google…

I received an invitation for the E12 Beta. I have worked on Exchange since 5.0 and am very interested in testing the new product. Is there anyway to know if and when I will have access to the Beta? I have written reviews on the product in the past and am anxious to get a head start on its features…

Will the new version of ESM address the lack of Organizational Forms management? With E2K3 you can’t rely on ESM to find and/or count how many forms you have. Also having to use Outlook to backup your forms is a pity.

There are also some tools out there that MS has made that I think should be merged as features into ESM. Those would be PFDavAdmin and ModifyItems (Used to ‘touch’ items to force replication).

I attended the IT-Forum last november in Barcelona and was quite astonished by all the things demonstrated by the Exchange team about E12. So I was anxiously waiting for the conference DVD so I could show all these beautifull things to my colleagues. But much to my suprise the DVD contained material from all sessions but nothing about E12, why is that?

I agree. An open beta would help all developers make important decisions on what can or cannot be used in forthcoming projects. I need to know about the Workflow Integration but cannot find any info on this subject.

Please tell us if we will see the ability to choose the SMTP proxy address which will appear as the FROM address for outbound SMTP email. This is a severe inconvenience for those of us out there managing multiple SMTP domains for distinct DBAs in a small company.

I have allways been dissapointed in the recovery of Exchange (more than 6 stores and 200GB) and was looking forward to it being released on SQL. Is it not moving to that because of cost? If so then the Enterprise edition should seperate that limitation. Also has there been improvments on the "dial up recovery" model?